All of the music you hear on this site has begun as these drum performances. You may even recognize some of them by cadence. Feel free to create with the ideas! If you want to use my work for commercial purposes, we can work something out. :D

In the world today (especially in the USA) there's so many ways to connect with people. I love meeting people so much that I began spending quite a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and browsing news stories and whatnot. As stories piqued my interest, I began finding myself falling down "the rabbit hole of outrage" every morning" and would waste considerable time bandying about arguments with people bots who are designed to keep one in a current froth and foaming at the mouth for a part of their day.

And recently I've managed to "catch myself before I fall" through said rabbit hole and into an afternoon of checking that thread to see what other conjecture occurred in my absence, and so have begin to limit my Social Media interaction to specific points in the day spread out among several networks, in an attempt to gain focus on when/how I interact in life both on and off the idiot screen.

Creatives Will Rule The Planet (...Eventually)

What's really "free?" How many meaningful things in your surroundings are things you've gotten for "free"? If you have lots of things that cost you nothing, that is not really a fulfilling way to live your life. But I do know this- The person who finds something spectacular after digging through garbage cans will feel a greater sense of satisfaction with their acquisition than would someone who inherited a fortune and has never had to dig for anything. When you extend some effort to a cause, either monetarily or personal time invested, you gain a deeper level of satisfaction overall.

"Good ain't cheap, and cheap ain't good"

The thing I love about the collaboration community is that it opens the door for "career creatives" to hire out their services in a more formal manner. It's fun plinking around in the studio, banging out randomness and things that please me at the moment. And anyone, ANYONE serious about this as a career must realize that there is most definitely a "quid pro quo" standard that is largely unspoken. If you're known for slipping a musician a few bucks for their time, that does NOT go unnoticed and that creative will defer to your project before others. A little "palm grease" can go a long way.

And being a professional musician these days is damn hard! For 30+ years I was fortunate to make a living playing drums and pretty much nothing else. As music becomes more accessible to individuals through the internet and as attention spans are hijacked by all the big screen TVs that are becoming more commonplace these days (not to mention all the cool gadgetry that fits in one's pocket!) keeping people engaged for 60-120 minutes is a lot of mental focus.

I am glad for sites like ccMixter, because they are bridges that will connect more of us "career musicians" with the "casual composers" who have been writing their opus for quite some time. Finding people who can play their vision and someone who can polish that to their sonic liking can and will become as accessible as is the ease of discovering new ideas and riffs on ccMixter.

If there's one thing I can remember from when I was a little kid, it was some old film or radio broadcast stating that how "in the future, people will be able to pick up any instrument and create music as if they had played all their lives." And with the aid of varying degrees of technology, that prediction has now come true.

My first collaboration was back in 1986 with my old friend Spencer Jones in Jackson, MS. I had recorded some wacky drum solo in a friend's studio and Spence got hold of it and created this bizarre little ditty. I wish there was a copy of that to share.

In 2006 I was determined to begin creating a digital body of work of my expressions and "sketches", for lack of a better word. The first things I recorded were "Funk #1" which has ended up in many projects, two of which I'm quite proud "Esperanto" by The Odd Get Even and "Forever" by The Journeymen.